Clock starts ticking on sewer work

BUCYRUS — Nearly a decade's worth of planning and negotiations with first the Ohio EPA and then the U.S. EPA got the city of Bucyrus to where it finally found itself Thursday evening, ready to sign off on a consent order with the latter agency to begin work on an enormous sewer separation project.

The Buffalo Run separation, expected to take up to 30 years to complete at a cost of anywhere from $40 million to $80 million, is going to make a mess along some city streets. Many of the city's largest, most beautiful trees will be lost. And every resident will foot the bill for this huge undertaking through higher sewer rates for the foreseeable future, and beyond.

During a special City Council meeting Thursday, members voted to enter a consent order with the U.S. EPA to begin the project separating the city's storm water and sanitary sewers. It's being broken down into three phases.

The first phase, scheduled to begin at the beginning of 2016 with completion set for no later than the end of 2022, includes a Southern Avenue trunk sewer extension and connections, upper Buffalo Run storm water detention, Sandusky interceptor and Buffalo Run inspections, and finally the Plymouth Street separation, which isn't technically part of the Buffalo Run work, but the city is getting credit from the EPA for taking it on.

"It's taken a long time to get to this point," Tina Wolfe, an engineer with Arcadis Consulting, the city's partner on the project, told Council.

"This order is a statement of their respect. Your effort over the years has been acknowledged."

City law director Rob Ratliff observed that the language in some parts of the consent order resembled a federal plea agreement. The U.S. EPA's civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance can run as high as $25,000 a day. Last year the agency took in $100 million in such penalties.

"A lot is required of us to maintain compliance with the EPA. Maintenance of our current sewer system is important. We can't funnel money from the current system just to be in compliance," Ratliff said.

On average – it depends almost entirely on the weather – the city's interceptors become too full and overflow anywhere from 30 to 40 times a year. The EPA is requiring the city to get that down to 10 to 11 times annually.

Although the EPA sewer-separation requirements, affecting communities large and small all across the state, go back several years, they've been given new impetus by the toxic algal blooms that have begun to afflict Lake Erie each summer. Bucyrus, with the Sandusky River running through town, is in the western Lake Erie watershed.

The city has instituted a new fee structure to pay for the sewer work consisting of a 3 percent rate increase as well as a monthly fixed fee of $7.20. Those numbers will have to be re-evaluated down the road.

"We're going to have to continue to look ahead as we do this to make sure it's properly funded," Council president Sis Love said.

Ratliff the EPA is already asking the city to start drawing up plans for not just the second phase of the project, but the third phase as well. He said that could require further fee increases as soon as 2020.

But Wolfe told the Council members that the city is well situated as the clock starts ticking on this massive project.

"They accepted what we proposed," she said of the EPA. "We're in a very good place. Many communities would like to be where we are."

The Buffalo Run is a very large sewer system that runs under a third of Bucyrus. Phase one of the separation project covers a third of the Buffalo Run.

"It is our biggest bang for the buck, and the biggest step toward getting us in compliance," Wolfe said.